ANGELA B. PAN

If you haven’t noticed, one of my all time favorite things to photograph are the cherry blossoms at the Tidal Basin every spring. It may get crowded and it may get over done, but I don’t know I just love them. It makes me so happy to walk around these big trees and feel like flowers are all around me. My absolute favorite is when we get a little gust of wind and you see the pedals flying off the trees. It’s literally like I’m in a winter wonderland of pretty, pink petals and I just get that warm fuzzy feeling inside.

So I started thinking, why do I like photographing these flowers so much? I think it all started from my Grandma. I call her Nai Nai. She lived with us all throughout my elementary school years. One of the clearest visions I have from that time is sitting at a desk with her and watching her paint Chinese water color paintings. I remember she’d spend hours practicing her strokes. She’d have one piece of paper and practice painting the same flower over and over again. I just loved watching it.

I’m not much of a painter but her love of flowers have rubbed off on me. If you look up from my desk, one of the first things you’ll see is one of her flower paintings (still waiting to be framed) and it makes me so happy. I think I’m subconsciously channeling my Nai Nai when I’m out taking pictures of the cherry blossoms.  Recently we were looking through my phone and I was showing her some of my photography. Every time I showed her a flower image, she’d look up at me, smile and say “PRETTY!” Other memorials and things, not so much. But if there was a flower, “PRETTY!” 😀

The settings for this image is F6.3 at 1/15th of a second at ISO 200 with my Sony A7II and 16-35mm wide angle lens.

Obviously, one of my favorite parts of spring time in Washington DC are the cherry blossoms and all the other trees that bloom flowers but I love the tulips too. They’re almost everywhere you go. All the memorials and monuments have tulips somewhere that you can use them as foreground. It just makes me feel so happy when I see them. These flowers in particular belong to the Floral Library that’s right at the Tidal Basin. Luckily they’re facing the Washington Monument and are perfect for a photoshoot. For example… LOLOL

Even at a young age, my mom would teach me to appreciate flowers. I don’t remember a time where we didn’t have a garden at our house. But I’m pretty sure I didn’t pose myself like that. It looks very similar to something my mom or grandma would make me do. I even have pictures of them posing me in different poses to prove that I was just there little doll to take pictures of. I’d think some people would be unhappy about that. I still love it. I think it’s so funny and it’s fun to see pictures of my grandma interacting with me. Plus, if I came up with my own pose, I’m pretty sure my tongue would of been out for this adorable moment in time. HAHAHA.

So for the first image, the camera settings were f7.1 at 1/60th of a second ISO 320. I bumped up my ISO a little more for this since it was a cloudy day but it was also fairly windy. I wanted the flowers to be still in this image so I tried my best to get my shutter faster without making it too noisy.

No clue what the settings were for the second image. I’m confident that it was shot on automatic camera though. Noob.